Your Single Source of Truth Is a Beautiful Lie
The keyboard clicks have a perfect rhythm. It’s the sound of certainty, of code slotting neatly into place, each line a logical conclusion to the one before it. The spec document, all 21 pages of it, sits open on the second monitor-a holy text. Every requirement is clear, every user flow delineated. This feature, PX-881, is a clean build. For the first time in what feels like months, there is no ambiguity. Just the clean, direct path from documented request to functional code.
Then comes the shadow over the shoulder, the break in the hum of the air conditioner. “Hey, just checking in. How’s 881 coming along?”
It’s the manager. You point to the screen, a flicker of pride in your chest. It works. It does exactly what the document says it should. The manager squints, tilting his head. “Ah. Right. Yeah, we changed that. On the call yesterday. The whole login flow is inverted now. Didn’t you get the vibe?”
And in that moment, the entire edifice of corporate certainty collapses. The wiki, the project management tool, the official documentation-it’s all revealed to be an elaborate piece of theater. We pretend to have a central, unimpeachable source of truth, a stable ground upon which to build. But the real work, the actual decisions, happen in the ether. They are verbal, ephemeral, and transmitted via osmosis to the lucky few who happened to be on that one specific call.
It’s a beautifully maintained archive of what we once agreed upon, before reality intervened. The real, operational truth isn’t a document; it’s a fast-moving, multi-channel stream of whispers, Slack corrections, off-hand remarks in a stand-up, and sudden pivots made at minute 41 of a Zoom call that, of course, no one recorded.
Corporate Schism: Paper vs. Real
The Paper Company
Orderly and logical, with clear, written rules.
≠
The Real Company
Chaotic, improvisational, dynamic decisions.
Your job is to somehow build a coherent product while listening to both tracks at once, knowing that only one of them actually matters, and it’s never the one that’s written down.
We tell ourselves we need better discipline. “If it’s not in the wiki, it doesn’t exist!” someone will declare heroically in a meeting. Everyone nods sagely, and then immediately goes back to making critical decisions in a Slack DM with 11 participants. Why? Because it’s faster. Because writing is slow, and consensus is messy, and a conversation feels like progress. The problem isn’t laziness; it’s that our tools for documentation are fundamentally at odds with the speed and medium of our decisions.
The Human Factor: Trusting the Latest ‘Vibe’
I was talking about this with Nora C.-P. a while back. She’s a researcher who studies crowd behavior, of all things, but her work is shockingly applicable to corporate dynamics. She ran a fascinating study with 41 participants who were tasked with assembling a complex piece of equipment using only a printed manual. Then, a plant in the group-an actor-would confidently suggest a “shortcut” that directly contradicted the manual.
Static, older, written truth.
→
Confident, recent, spoken truth.
We are building companies on that same principle.
The Delusion of Artifacts: Browser Tabs to Project Wikis
I am not immune to this delusion. Just this morning, I had a perfect workflow going. I had 71 tabs open-a carefully curated ecosystem of research, articles, half-written emails, and API documentation. It was a complete thought, externalized across my browser window. It was my actual source of truth for the project I was working on.
My neatly saved bookmarks folder, my official “documentation,” was useless. The real knowledge, the living context, was in that chaotic arrangement of temporary tabs. I made the classic mistake: I trusted the artifact, not the process. We do the same thing with our wikis.
We get obsessed with the idea of the perfect document. We spend hours in meetings trying to wordsmith a project brief into oblivion. The goal is to create a flawless artifact that anticipates every possible question. This is a fool’s errand. It’s a defense mechanism against the terrifying reality that we don’t know all the answers yet. The document becomes a proxy for a certainty we don’t possess.
So we have to stop chasing this phantom. I’ve seen some teams try to fix this with more process-meeting minutes, decision logs, endless approval chains. It’s an attempt to nail down the chaos, but it just creates more administrative drag. It tries to force the square peg of fluid conversation into the round hole of a static database. I used to think this was the only way, that more rigorous documentation was the answer. I now realize I was completely wrong.
If the decision was made on a call, the call is the artifact. If the nuance was debated in a Slack thread, the thread is the documentation. The problem isn’t the medium; it’s the lack of access and searchability. A one-hour video of a meeting is a terrible source of truth because nobody has time to watch it, and you can’t Command-F a spoken conversation. But what if you could?
The Solution: Searchable Conversations
This hit me when a colleague in our Brazil office recorded a 21-minute product demo where a critical decision about our new onboarding flow was made. It was a conversation, full of the nuance and context that a written summary would have crushed. To make it useful for our global team, especially for those who weren’t native English speakers, his first instinct was to gerar legenda em video.
The moment the transcript was generated, the entire dynamic changed. The inaccessible, ephemeral conversation became a searchable, citable document. You could find the exact moment the lead designer said “Let’s go with the three-step flow instead of one” in about 11 seconds. The transcript, linked to the video, became the new SSoT.
This is the shift. We need to stop trying to create pristine, artificial sources of truth and start building systems that capture the messy, authentic, and truly authoritative sources: our own conversations.
It’s a system that acknowledges that a decision isn’t a static entry in a database, but a living moment in time, backed by debate, emotion, and context. It’s admitting that the truth is spoken first, and written down later.
-
Tagged health